Man and Boy review – Rattigan’s murky reunion staged in silver-screen style
A financier facing corruption charges is reunited with his son in this high-concept mishmash of screwball comedy and financial thriller
The National Theatre is certainly mixing it up. A debut writer was showcased on its biggest stage last autumn (Nima Taleghani with Bacchae). Now a canonical playwright is in a space associated with the new and edgy – although Terence Rattigan fans may not recognise his lesser-performed 1963 play.
It charts the fall of a megalomaniacal Romanian financier, Gregor Antonescu (Ben Daniels), and his reunion with his estranged son, Basil Anthony (Laurie Kynaston). The latter has changed his name and is trying to make it as a songwriter when Gregor re-enters his life, beleaguered with corruption charges and on the verge of exposure.
Director Anthony Lau has put a thoroughly new spin on this old yarn but one which sadly drains the emotion and tragedy. Set in a 1930s basement apartment in Greenwich Village, the production has been jazzed up for this jazz age. Georgia Lowe’s set design gestures to the silver screen, with credits written across one wall in an art deco-style font, lighting up every time the relevant actors/characters appear on stage.
Artifice is underlined in other ways, with green baize all around and initially a central table that stands in for a room. It suggests a giant game of snooker, with characters playing each other perhaps, as they clamber on to tables or shift them around. Knock Knock is written on top of the gangway representing the door. Is this all a big theatrical joke?
The first half is pulled down by the weight of its laboured reinvention. The drama is so arch that it seems operatic – the bigger the performances, the more you feel removed from Rattigan’s subtexts. Kynaston projects bewilderment and anger but never seems quite at home. Basil’s betrayal by Gregor, who attempts to pimp him out to an American businessman, Mark Herries (Malcolm Sinclair), in order to save himself, gets lost in the overheated conceptual fray.
Some characters bring a cartoonish edge, like Basil’s girlfriend, Carol Penn (Phoebe Campbell), with her exaggerated Long Island accent, and Herries’s comically tetchy lawyer (Leo Wan). Gregor’s wife (Isabella Laughland) struts on in silk pyjamas and heels to give a deliciously charged performance, but this former typist turned fake countess is too much of a type to feel real. There is strangely poised or slow-motion movement, especially by Gregor, in what seems like a heavily stylised mishmash of screwball comedy and financial thriller.
It engages more when some of the theatrics are dropped, a little too late. Gregor is like a darker version of Jay Gatsby and so much distance has been created that his downfall becomes emotionally remote, his self-loathing rejection of filial love understood rather than felt.
It is a shame because this is an explosive story about the corruptions of capitalism with present-day echoes of Jeffrey Epstein, but the concepts smother the drama.
At Dorfman theatre, National Theatre, London, until 14 March.